Volume Ii Part 6 (1/2)
The state, also, promotes activity, enterprise, hardihood, perseverance and thrift. The American Government is eminently distinguished by these five qualities. The form of government stimulates patriotism, each man has a share in the public lot. The theocracies, monarchies, and aristocracies of old time have produced good and great examples of patriotism, in the few or the many; but the n.o.bler forms of love of country, of self-denial and disinterested zeal for its sake, are left for a democracy to bring to light.
Here all men are voters, and all great questions are, apparently and in theory, left to the decision of the whole people. This popular form of government is a great instrument in developing and instructing the mind of the nation. It helps extend and intensify the intelligent activity which is excited by business and the press. Such is the nature of our political inst.i.tutions that, in the free states, we have produced the greatest degree of national unity of action, with the smallest restriction of personal freedom, have reconciled national unity with individual variety, not seeking uniformity; thus room is left for as much individualism as a man chooses to take; a vast power of talent, enterprise and invention is left free for its own work. Elsewhere, save in England, this is latent, kept down by government. Since this power is educated and has nothing to hold it back; since so much brute work is done by cattle and the forces of nature, now domesticated and put in harness, and much time is left free for thought, more intelligence is demanded, more activity, and the citizens of the free states have become the most active, enterprising and industrious people in the world; the most inventive in material work.
In all these three forms of action there is much to stir men to love of distinction. The career is open to talent, to industry; open to every man; the career of letters, business, and politics. Our rich men were poor men; our famous men came of sires else not heard of. The laurel, the dollar, the office, and the consequent social distinction of men successful in letters, business and politics, these excite the obscure or needy youth to great exertions, and he cannot sleep; emulation wakes him early, and keeps him late astir. Behind him, scattering ”the rear of darkness,” stalk poverty and famine, gaunt and ugly forms, with scorpion whip to urge the tardier, idler man. The intense ambition for money, for political power, and the social results they bring, keeps men on the alert. So ambition rises early, and works with diligence that never tires.
The Church, embracing all the churches under that name, cultivates the memory of men, and teaches reverence for the past; it helps keep activity from wandering into unpopular forms of wickedness or of unbelief. Men who have the average intelligence, goodness and piety, it keeps from slipping back, thus blocking to rearward the wheels of society, so that the ascent gained shall not be lost; men who have less than this average it urges forward, addressing them in the name of G.o.d, encouraging by hope of heaven, and driving with fear of h.e.l.l. It turns the thought of the people towards G.o.d; it sets before us some facts in the life, and some parts of the doctrine, of the n.o.blest One who ever wore the form of man, bidding us wors.h.i.+p him. The ecclesiastical wors.h.i.+p of Jesus of Nazareth is, perhaps, the best thing in the American church.
It has the Sunday and the inst.i.tution of preaching under its control. A body of disciplined men are its servants; they praise the ordinary virtues; oppose and condemn the unpopular forms of error and of sin.
Petty vice, the vice of low men, in low places, is sure of their lash.
They promote patriotism in its common form. Indirectly, they excite social and industrial rivalry, and favor the love of money by the honor they bestow upon the rich and successful. But at the same time they temper it a little, sometimes telling men, as business or the state does not, that there is in man a conscience, affection for his brother-man, and a soul which cannot live by bread alone; no, not by wealth, office, fame and social rank. They tell us, also, of eternity, where worldly distinctions, except of orthodox and heterodox, are forgotten, where wealth is of no avail; they bid us remember G.o.d.
Such are the good things of these great national forces; the good things which in this fourfold way we are teaching ourselves. The nation is a monitorial school, wonderfully contrived for the education of the people. I do not mean to say that it is by the forethought of men that the American democracy is at the same time a great practical school for the education of the human race. This result formed no part of our plan, and is not provided for by the Const.i.tution of the United States; it comes of the forethought of G.o.d, and is provided for in the Const.i.tution of the Universe.
Now each of these educational forces has certain defects, negative evils, and certain vices, positive evils, which tend to misdirect the nation, and so hinder the general education of the people: of these, also, let me speak in detail.
The state appeals to force, not to justice; this is its last appeal; the force of muscles aided by force of mind, instructed by modern science in the art to kill. The nation appeals to force in the settlement of affairs out of its borders. We have lately seen an example of this, when we commenced war against a feeble nation, who, in that special emergency, had right on her side, about as emphatically as the force was on our side. The immediate success of the enterprise, the popular distinction acquired by some of the leaders, the high honor bestowed on one of its heroes, all this makes the lesson of injustice attractive. It may be that a similar experiment will again be tried, and doubtless with like success. Certainly there is no nation this side of the water which can withstand the enterprise, the activity, the invention, industry and perseverance of a people so united, and yet so free and intelligent.
Another successful injustice of this character, on a large scale, will make right still less regarded, and might honored yet more.
The force we employ out of our borders, might opposed to right, we employ also at home against our brethren, and keep three millions of them in bondage; we watch for opportunities to extend the inst.i.tution of slavery over soil unpolluted by that triple curse, and convert the Const.i.tution, the fundamental law of the land, into an instrument for the defence of slavery.
The men we honor politically, by choosing them to offices in the state, are commonly men of extraordinary force, sometimes, it is true, only of extraordinary luck, but of only ordinary justice; men who, perhaps, have mind in the heroic degree, but conscience of the most vulgar pattern.
They are to keep the law of the United States when it is wholly hostile to the law of the universe, to the everlasting justice of G.o.d.
I am not speaking to politicians, professional representatives of the state; not speaking for political effect; not of the state as a political machine for the government of the people. I am speaking to teachers, for an educational purpose; of the state as an educational machine, as one of the great forces for the spiritual development of the people. Now by this preference of force and postponement of justice at home and abroad, in the selection of men for office, with its wealth, and rank, and honor, by keeping the law of the land to the violation of the law of G.o.d, it is plain we are teaching ourselves to love wrong; at least to be insensible to the right. What we practise on a national scale as a people, it is not easy to think wrong when practised on a personal scale, by this man and that.
The patriotism, also, which the state nurses, is little more than that Old Testament patriotism which loves your countryman, and hates the stranger; the affection which the Old Testament attributes to Jehovah, and which makes him say, ”I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau;” a patriotism which supports our country in the wrong as readily as in the right, and is glad to keep one sixth part of the nation in bondage without hope. It is not a patriotism which, beginning here, loves all the children of G.o.d, but one that robs the Mexican, enslaves the African, and exterminates the Indian.
These are among the greater evils taught us by the political action of the people as a whole. If you look at the action of the chief political parties, you see no more respect for justice in the politics of either party, than in the politics of the nation, the resultant of both; no more respect for right abroad, or at home. One party aims distinctively at preserving the property already acquired; its chief concern is for that, its sympathy there; where its treasure is, is also its heart. It legislates, consciously or otherwise, more for acc.u.mulated wealth, than for the laboring man who now acc.u.mulates. This party goes for the dollar; the other for the majority, and aims at the greatest good of the greatest number, leaving the good of the smaller number to most uncertain mercies. Neither party seems to aim at justice, which protects both the wealth that labor has piled up, and the laborer who now creates it; justice, which is the point of morals common to man and G.o.d, where the interests of all men, abroad and at home, electing and elected, greatest number and smallest number, exactly balance. Falsehood, fraud, a willingness to deceive, a desire for the power and distinction of office, a readiness to use base means in obtaining office--these vices are sown with a pretty even hand upon both parties, and spring up with such blossoms and such a fruitage as we all see. The third political party has not been long enough in existence to develop any distinctive vices of its own.
I shall not speak of the public or private character of the politicians who direct the state; no doubt that is a powerful element in our national education; but as a cla.s.s, they seem no better and no worse than merchants, mechanics, ministers and farmers, as a cla.s.s; so in their influence there is nothing peculiar, only their personal character ceases to be private, and becomes a public force in the education of the people.
The Churches have the same faults as the State. There is the same postponement of justice and preference of force, the same neglect of the law of G.o.d in their zeal for the statutes of men; the same crouching to dollars or to numbers. However, in the churches these faults appear negatively, rather than as an affirmation. The worldliness of the church is not open, self-conscious and avowed; it is not, as a general thing, that human injustice is openly defended, but rather justice goes by default. But if the churches do not positively support and teach injustice, as the state certainly does, they do not teach the opposite, and, so far as that goes, are allies of the state in its evil influence.
The fact that the churches, as such, did not oppose the war, and do not oppose slavery, its continuance, or its extension; nay, that they are often found its apologists and defenders, seldom its opponents; that they not only pervert the sacred books of the Christians to its defence, but wrest the doctrines of Christianity to justify it; the fact that they cannot, certainly do not, correct the particularism of the political parties, the love of wealth in one, of mere majorities in the other; that they know no patriotism not bounded by their country, none coextensive with mankind; that they cannot resist the vice of party spirit--these are real proofs that the church is but the ally of the state in this evil influence.
But the church has also certain specific faults of its own. It teaches injustice by continually referring to the might of G.o.d, not His justice; to His ability and will to d.a.m.n mankind, not asking if He has the right?
It teaches that in virtue of His infinite power, He is not amenable to infinite justice, and to infinite love. Thus, while the state teaches, in the name of expediency and by practice, that the strong may properly be the tyrants of the weak, the mighty nation over the feeble, the strong race over the inferior, that the government may dispense with right at home and abroad--the church, as theory in Christ's name, teaches that G.o.d may repudiate His own justice and His own love.
The churches have little love of truth, as such, only of its uses. It must be such a truth as they can use for their purposes; canonized truth; truth long known; that alone is acceptable and called ”religious truth;” all else is ”profane and carnal,” as the reason which discovers it. They represent the average intelligence of society; hence, while keeping the old, they welcome not the new. They promote only popular forms of truth, popular in all Christendom, or in their special sect.
They lead in no intellectual reforms; they hinder the leaders.
Negatively and positively, they teach, that to believe what is clerically told you in the name of religion, is better than free, impartial search after the truth. They dishonor free thinking, and venerate constrained believing. When the clergy doubt, they seldom give men audience of their doubt. Few scientific men not clerical believe the Bible account of creation,--the universe made in six days, and but a few thousand years ago,--or that of the formation of woman, and of the deluge. Some clerical men still believe these venerable traditions, spite of the science of the times; but the clerical men who have no faith in these stories not only leave the people to think them true and miraculously taught, but encourage men in the belief, and calumniate the men of science who look the universe fairly in the face and report the facts as they find them.
The church represents only the popular morality, not any high and aboriginal virtue. It represents not the conscience of human nature, reflecting the universal and unchangeable moral laws of G.o.d, touched and beautified by his love, but only the conscience of human history, reflecting the circ.u.mstances man has pa.s.sed by, and the inst.i.tutions he has built along the stream of time. So, while it denounces unpopular sins, vices below the average vice of society, it denounces also unpopular excellence, which is above the average virtue of society. It blocks the wheels rearward, and the car of humanity does not roll down hill; but it blocks them forward also. No great moral movement of the age is at all dependent directly on the church for its birth; very little for its development. It is in spite of the church that reforms go forward; it holds the curb to check more than the rein to guide. In morals, as in science, the church is on the anti-liberal side, afraid of progress, against movement, loving ”yet a little sleep, a little slumber;” conservative and chilling, like ice, not creative, nor even quickening, as water. It doffs to use and wont; has small confidence in human nature, much in a few facts of human history. It aims to separate Piety from Goodness, her natural and heaven-appointed spouse, and marry her to Bigotry, in joyless and unprofitable wedlock. The church does not lead men to the deep springs of human nature, fed ever from the far heights of the Divine nature, whence flows that river of G.o.d, full of living water, where weary souls may drink perennial supply. While it keeps us from falling back, it does little directly to advance mankind.
In common with the state, this priest and Levite pa.s.s by on the other side of the least developed cla.s.ses of society, leaving the slave, the pauper, and the criminal, to their fate, hastening to strike hands with the thriving or the rich.